Have you heard? The just-released 12th version of Next.js uses a Rust-based compiler (swc) to achieve ~3x faster local refreshes and ~5x faster production builds.

Compilation using Rust is 17x faster than Babel and enabled by default using Next.js 12, replacing transforming JavaScript and TypeScript files. This meant we had to port the Babel transformations in Next.js to Rust, including a brand new CSS parser in Rust used to implement the styled-jsx transform.

With the increased popularity of Rust and Go-based JS tooling, could there be a future where we don’t use any JavaScript to build our JavaScript apps? 🤔